Evaluation For Phresh Morning Show

When we were first put into our radio groups, I felt quite excited, because trying to create a radio show, with hardly any experience in that field made the assignment quite unpredictable. I decided to evaluate the morning show as I am one of the presenters for that show.

Our first airing was of our morning show that was pre - recorded, Jon began accidently by pressing the wrong bumper. Good start that was. As I was one of the presenters I introduced the guests and that was Jamie, Craig & Kris, as there were the people that were on the microphones. However once we were on air we didn’t really follow the codes and conventions of original/professional radio programmes as Jon forgot to play sound beds when the guests and I were talking, which created an unprofessional feel that the actual radio shows would frown upon.

Jon decided to play a three minute song before introducing himself and his guests, I thought doing this, made the radio show seem more exciting and unpredictable, giving the audience the feel that we are not like some boring radio shows where it's just talking, but it's a nice and fresh feel to it (thats why the show is called Phresh FM). Also by doing this, our target audience could immediately be drawn into the show, with music they listen to, rather than people talking and having the listeners changing station.

When we brought up different topics we (Me & Jon) got the opinions of the topic from our guests. As the producer, Naomi, did schedule the show and gave the main presenter a list of the times and basically what was on the agenda, but unfortunately a script wasn't handed to us (Me & Jon) even though she said she could make a script for us. We did discover a problem when we tried to play our first song, and it was either that the ipod wasn't working or the levels weren't turn up high enough. The problem was eventually found and it was that jon didnt turn on the input levels therefore the song was playing but wasn't being heard on headphones or the speakers outside.

Later in the show we did conquer a disagreement between the crew members and that was about the quiz show ' Phresh FM quiz' and because the show was pre-recorded jon said that after the bumper and before the quiz i should basically introduce it. As I did that and the quiz was now being played there was a slight confusment between the members of the group and that was that because gemma was in the quiz and earlier in the show we hadn't introduced her and she wasn't pleased with that. This really irritated me because if Gemma wanted to be introduced she should have told me in person and the problems would have been sorted out but because she didnt say anything, I hadn't had the slightest idea that she wanted to be introduced, I would have introduced at the beginning of the show but her and Naomi were quite a distance away from the rest of the group and from the equipment therefore making them inactive to the show.

Apart from that, the rest of the show seemed to go on without anymore major mishaps introducing the news every 15 minutes, using bumpers correctly etc. But I do have some criticsms and that is that Jon ought to have used some soundbeds over some topics therefore making the conversation seem more interesting and fun, but with jon not using soundbeds of some sort the topics lacked professionalism. Also with our show we needed a script to follow, because at some points I felt that some conversations weren't going anywhere exciting and that people were talking over each other, and that really annoyed me.

Overall the way I think the show went for the listeners was very good, I feel the reception we would of got from that show would be quite good because of the professionalism that we try to install in the show. As a crew member I feel the show could have gone better with some better songs, soundbeds and better fluency with the topics. Also the topics that we spoke about, we didn’t have enough detail about them. I believe if we research and get more detail into other topics for our live Children In Need show, it would be even more successful and professional than our pre-recorded show.

Presenter
The presenting by Me and Jon Wills I thought was well controlled and was extremely professional throughout the show. I though recognised as we were doing the show that Jon's pitch and volumes of his voice was more well presented then mine to make his voice sound more overpowering, we did this to make the audience hear which presenter the main focus is on. Like in the research, Jon used inflections in his voice to make the audience realise if he was asking a question directly or if he was having just a conversation with the guests in the studio. He also kept the show very scheduled, as he would introduce a new conversation topic, a new feature to play or the next song; this helped keep the show flowing smoothly.

How I feel the audience would respond.

We made a radio show targeted at an audience that could be able to access the internet radio, as that would be the type of format we would be broadcasting on. From the research that I've found out, a large amount of the people we asked (for the questionnaires) were in the 16-23 age range. So we decided to aim our show at this type of audience. Also, we found out that this type of audience was particularly fond of the Chris Moyles' Show. Finding this out was was a great boost for us, as we now know what to base our show on.

The way Chris Moyles' show is mainly made up is of lively conversations and features with only a few songs. We wanted to improve that and try to increase the number of songs and try to decrease to length of talking, this is to try and keep our morning radio show fast paced and original, but not by too much as it might swing the attitude of our show, and make it feel like it might as well be a show for the evening. I believe we got the balance between songs and conversation done very well, primarily because when the topics were being discussed between the guests and myself we kept the discussion short but quite lively.

Sound Conventions in Radio

Sound conventions can indicate the importance of the different types of radio content expressed from the presenters by means of different levels and fades. On the other hand we have heard sounds that grabs the audience's attention not only by their meaning, but by having a link to words that are surrounding around it.

We also need music/soundboards that are related to the type of topics that are being discussed (i.e we cannot have heavy metal being played in background as we discuss X-Factor). Also soundboards can be played to the listeners to show them what the presenter is feeling like and what the presenter is thinking. Another word that expresses this is called 'Mood Music'

To create a real sense of what the presenters are saying we can't just have the music being played and no words being said as the listeners might not get drawn into to what the topic directly is.

PSB & Commercial Radio

PSB are Public Service Broadcasters. The PSB can be found controlling different types of media including radio, television and other electronic media outlets. The most popular PSB is the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), the BBC may recieve their funds from individual license fees, for radio and television.

This then allows the BBC to pay for special events (music festivals, better presenters for both TV and radio etc). It also gives the BBC much more freedom on what content they can show on their tv shows as they do not have advertisers trying to tell them otherwise. PSB also have much more of a bond with the public and their interests as they are PBS (Public Broadcasting Service).

Commercial radio on the other hand raise their funds by different advertisers advertising on their radio and television stations/channels, here are some commercial radio stations: Heart FM, Kiss FM and Smooth FM etc, because they are funded by advertisers, this makes the radio station much more non-independent/commercial and doesn't really appeal to the audience's interest. But the commercial radio is possibly not going to carry on as strong as the PSB radio as the advertising avenue is going down.

Logo Analysis

We wanted to be professional with how we run our radio station, so if we were to advertise this properly we needed to create a logo, so the audience can recognise the logo anywhere.

Whilst creating my logo the idea of shapes came to me from looking at different radio logos in the logo itself a shape of some sort appears. Here are some examples

(Xtra)
(htt)

As you can see by the examples that I have referenced, that radio stations that use shapes will attract a number of audiences. If I could take this into consideration I could show the professionalism of my logo, yet I know that other well known radio stations do not use many shapes I felt that using shapes on the logo could draw in other viewers that haven’t seen this logo and then get them to listen to our radio station, this can improve our audience.

Below is my logo and you can see how including shapes in other companies’ logos have influenced me in to adding in shapes. I haven’t just included shapes but I have also made the logo colourful to try and attract different types of people of our target audience. By this logo the audience are still unaware of what style of music we play, although, the audience might recognise by the style of the logo and the colours is that we will not be playing heavy metal music or dark style of music, it seems like we will be playing a quite upbeat style of music, also by looking at the style and conventions of the logo it could be interoperated that we play reggae style music which is not what we wish to play. This theory arose when see the colourful circle as the sun and the font of the lettering could represent a Caribbean style radio show…..which we are not.

Here is my second logo that I created for the radio show as you can see the style is completely different and sends out a different message, I also changed radio to fm because after more research all the radio stations that broadcast for our target audience the words fm is more frequently used more than radio so deciding to do this is to try and register with our target audience. Though after looking more closely at the logo, the lack of colour could really jeopardise our logo into not attracting the audience so I decided to add a little colour to it.

Here is the new logo a little colour was added to emphasis the fm and also separates the two words to make both stand out in there own ways. I’ve I added colour to the word ‘phresh’ the whole empowerment of the phrase would be gone and it would just look like a disaster. Like the Caribbean style logo it sent out a message saying that we play calming music but this logo gives out the impression that the music we play is very urban and up to date with the chart music. The reason to why I chose the colour was because there is already a TV channel that try and reach to the younger generation and the type of teenagers that we are trying to target so I chose to have the same colours as them so the target audience could try and link us to the channel U.

The only problem with this logo is that the lack of shapes isn’t really attracting the audience that
we intend to target.

So I created a logo with a shape and the colour that our target audience would recognise and link with other radio stations/tv channels that idolise the style of music that we plan to play. I thought having a little shape on the logo wouldn't be neccessary so I added a circle where the audience could recognise it instanly. The idea of how the shape should be made and how it looks came from how the planet jupiter is with the circle representing the orbit. I feel that if this logo is picked for our main show logo our audience would see it representing a style of music which our they like and the logo saying so much with a simple design.

Focus Group

To get audience feedback we went out to the public and showed them the following·

a 5minute clip of radio 1 and what they though
a pre-recorder rehearsal of both morning & aftenoon shows and what they thought
let them listen to a couple of features and note their reaction
give them a list of our draft playlists for both shows.

Reaction
The reaction that we seemed to see from the listeners is that they liked the by expressing the phrases 'It was very lively' and other phrases like 'They brought up a lot of interesting topics'. But with good reviews there are bound to be bad ones, one review stated 'I thought there was too much talking and not enough music'. We took this criticsm in and decided to act upon it. The main criticsm was aimed at the Phresh morning show with Jon & Brett because of the style of the presenter and how the presenter presented. The most interesting statement that was said was 'He was too unusual', obviosly we cannot change presenters now as we are too far into the assignment and too close to the live airing of our Phresh Fm Show.

Research Into Radio Broadcasting Platforms

To get a better range of audience radio stations more often than not use Broadcasting platforms such as Ustream, Internet radio box etc. Ustream is a very popular website and is used professionally, it consists of different lifecasting (broadcasting that is live) and other live streaming events that are shown online.
The platform was created in 2007 and over the years have had 2 million registers with over 1.5 million videos being upload each month. Knowing this information, as a group we decided to try involve our Promo & Advertisement to Ustream to try and gather even more viewers than just having the features on YouTube.
But trying to find what age range is mainly operating/using ustream wasn't clear for us as the information seemed impossible to find. After finding information from people in the target audience we found that hardly/none use it. After finding this we thought using Ustream wasn't neccessary and decided not to air it on there.

The Station Identity

No matter what the format is, what type of music you play or what city you're in, the one thing that is absolutely necessary for the successful radio station is to establish a identity. We have found out that our identity as a radio station is our Phresh morning show with Jon & brett is quite chatty and conversational with calming/relaxing music. The reason to why we have done this is because we thought that the listeners wouldn't want to have just music for especially the morning show because whilst in the morning the enviorment/surroundings are more quiet than in the afternoon so we try to jam in as much information as possible.

For the Phresh afternoon show with Kris & Craig we have changed the whole style and format of the show therefore changing the identity completely. Unlike the morning show the identity of the afternoon show is just music and topics, because our target audience are most likely to be on the move (i.e car/public transport) or at work also for our orginal target audience who are coming home from school/college/university. So we play just music and topics (that our target audience would respond to) because they would rather listen to music than a chatty conversation.

As the radio station as a whole the audience have establioshed what identity the station has by our promos and adverts regarding our station by the phrase of a deep voice saying 'Phresh Fm' with an explosion and the slogan 'Better fresh than frozen' that we needed to say more on our advert and promos more. We then emphasis the connection with the adverts and promos by saying the explosion with the Phresh fm speech.

PLAYLIST

To try and be as professional as the actual radio stations we need songs to represent the time of the day (i.e calming/soothing music for morning) if we had RnB and dance songs in the morning the show wouldn't feel professional and I doubt our target audience would respond to it. For the different times of the day, there are different types of music that identify it (i.e Scott Mills plays Take That and up to date pop songs and some light dance songs, but in Tim Westwood's case he plays Dance/RnB/Dubstep, this is only because his show is from 9pm till 11, and his audience are most likely to be in our taregted audience, 16-25 year olds.

We also showed them a draft playlist to see their reaction to the music that we were planning for our show.

Response to draft playlist -

"They seem appropriate for the time of day but the morning only has 6 songs in a hour!"

"I like the idea of the news being every 15minutes as long as its not really long news cause that’s boring."

"I really love the variety of bands in the afternoon show, I could sit with my friends who have different tastes and all enjoy it."

Research Into Children In Need

So even though we are creating a radio station, our other aim is to raise awarness for Children In Need. Our shows (particularly the Phresh Afternoon Show) are linked to Children in Need and when we do mention Children In Need and talk about it it we plan to play Children In Needs songs that went into the Top 10 Chart over the last 6 years. Here are some of the songs that we plan to play.

2004 Girls Aloud I'll Stand By You
2005 Liberty X A Night to Remember
2006 Emma Bunton Downtown
2007 Spice Girls Headlines (Friendship Never Ends)
2008 McFly Do Ya/Stay With Me
2009 Peter Kay's Animated All Star Band The Official BBC Children in Need Medley
2010 JLS Love You More

We have decided to devote a segment from both of our shows to Children In Need, and in this segment we play a feature where people need to understand where the money is going and whom it is helping. As we still are a radio station we do not intend to play each Children In need song only the few that people might recognise. We also don’t intend to play them normally we intend to mix them all together like it is one big song, we are doing this so people might find this refreshing and interesting.

We also want to interview a guest from Children In Need as we want the listeners to hear directly from one of the people and letting them know what they plan to do to raise money, what they'll expect from the show and what they plan to do with the money. We want the guest to make known the information about the Children In Need whilst keeping it optimistic.

Cross Media

Our show is based on a mix between Radio 1 Xtra and Heart Fm as we are producing shows that play the same style of music. We needed to try and collect a more brouder, larger audience. So in order to do this we needed to think about not just over the radio but involving cross media.

So as a group we decided to approach the idea of cross media (YouTube, Social Networking etc) we all thought that if we did this, it could be a great way to advertise and promote our radio station. The radio also uses cross media to connect with their audience (i.e phone ins, messaging on social networks and text messages) also we have found that without having cross media the radio stations wouldn't survive on their own.

Radio1 has a YouTube channel where they upload their Live Lounge videos so there audience can view them. We knew this and so we didnt make a YouTube page but we did make a Facebook page, doing this made the chances of gaining more viewers for our target audience higher because our target audience are more likely to be on Facebook than they are on YouTube.

Here is a link to a graph to prove my evidence

http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/gallery/social-media-market-share

So we added some cross media which links to our radio show. For both our morning and afternoon shows, we have formed a Facebook fan page.

This is to attract listeners who are in our target audience, inside this page we have links to promotional videos, advertisements, our show and also a short description to what people should be expecting on our show. We formed this because we thought it as a chance to promote our show and to lift knowledge about Children In Need.

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Phreshfm/160210497337341

Research In Radio Profiles

Primary research

We have made questionnaires so that we can recognize our target audience. Also from the questionnaires results we will be able to identify what type of music and radio shows our target audience listen too. From this we can then decide what content is suitable for our show, so we can grab the interest of our identified target audience. But I wasn't involved in that area as the group were getting the results from the public, I was creating bumpers for our show at the time. It wasn't my idea, but the group and I agreed that it would be best for some of the members to help me, and creat some bumpers and the rest to go and get the results. This is the reason to why I have no results from the questionnaires in my blog.

Secondary research

I have found important figures on RAJAR (The organisation which measures the profiles from the audience’s of all UK radio stations) about radio data that could help us with our radio programming.

http://www.rajar.co.uk/listening/quarterly_listening.php

Doing this made me identify what radio stations are the most popular, then look at what they do in that particular radio station to make them so popular i.e music, style of presenter and so on.



Rajar

Rajar is a very helpful resource that researches the radio. They give out information regarding audience figures etc. This information is most likely ideal for advertisers and market researchers. But as we are only studnets and not official researchers we cannot be able to access the full amount of research that RAJAR has to offer, but i was able to find out audience figures and how other types of cross media has influence radio and the rise of listeners that have tuned in to radio.

This increase is shown in the digital listening hours, which have been seen to have reached a new
high of 262 million hours per week, up 22.8% from 213 million hours. DAB radio (digital radio)
continues to hold its position as the most popular device when it comes to listening to
digital radio, by having 61.8% of all digital hours, however listening via DTV (digital
television) and Internet have both continued to rise very quickly year on year, (hours up by
27.1% and 35.2% respectively).

DAB hours are 162 million (134m in Q3, 2009 – up 20.8%)

DTV hours are 47 million (37m in Q3, 2009 – up 27.1%)

Internet hours are 30 million (22m in Q3, 2009 – up 35.2%)

Advertisment

This is a link to our Advertisment that which can be seen on our 'Phresh Fm' Facebook page, so the audience that we intend to target can see it, like the promontional video. I felt creating this advertisment will possibly make our radio station more professional, after analysing radio stations and seeing that the best radio stations create adverts.

For this advertisment, I was again the camera operator. Making this advert was my idea as we needed to promote our radio station a bit more, but having the idea for the whole running sequence was the Jon's idea. I thought the idea was quite smart and imaginative, the whole reason to why Jon runs is because we need Jon to be recognised by the viewers/target audience. His urgency to get the CD to the studio is vital representing that Jon's character is important (realising by the end - when people celebrate when he gets there) and also representing his determination to get to the station.

I do feel quite impressed with the advertisement as a whole, but I do have some critisims of the advert and that is that having a continuos songs all the way through is good for a montage in the movies, but I wanted to possibly include different songs when in the advert the setting/scenery changes and the songs would represent what songs we would play on our radio station.

Originally when in the montage Jon runs up to the screen we were goping to have a freeze fram of Jon with his name appearing on the screen, but after consideration I thought that that wasnt relevant for an advertisment, because I haven't ever seen a freeze frame name on a advert before and thought that it wouldn't be professional. But having this advertisment, I believe would boost Phresh FM's status.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJXz3yGlFPU